Safe From Extremism
The big side benefit of childhood is that any and all major decisions affecting your day to day life needs are taken care of by others, usually parents. As you get older, you appreciate in hindsight that the mundane necessities of life were automatically in place without any effort or input from you at all. No need to worry about what to eat, where to live, and all of the usual creature comforts of life including toilet paper and clean clothes were provided for.
The flip side to this benign life is that you have little influence on these very things that are presented to you as conveniences. If you didn’t happen to like liver and onions for dinner, or living in a double wide, it was too bad. It wasn’t until mid-adolescence that the inner urge to express your own choices became overwhelming and the urge to pull away from the dictates of parents needed to be addressed. We could date girls with tattoos, go to late night bars and even buy sketchy tech IPO’s.
In the past few generations in western societies, this natural need for people to break free from the tethers of childhood has been eclipsed by an acceptance of protracted adolescence. Sadly, the arrival of affluence has made people more risk averse and unwilling to cross natural life milestones. The overbearing mother has taken a place of significant prominence in western society. Through many generations of subtle and now not so subtle coercion, the role of males has been overshadowed by the smothering mother.
We may have noticed the predilection towards ‘safety’ in whatever we do these days and thus, the avoidance of all things unsafe is paramount in our activities. It’s hard to quantify if the world has actually become so unsafe in recent generations that it’s necessary to place ‘safety’ above all else in our lives. Add lawyers to that and now you have a recipe for a neutered society.
In our pre-adolescent years, we were advised to avoid activities or people that were likely to compromise our ‘safety’. With the coming of age, we made our own decisions on such things for ourselves. In our modern information era, the ubiquitous social platforms have taken it upon themselves to be our permanent nannies by directing us against undesirable information….you know, to be safe.
It’s the greatest irony that living in a ‘free society’ actually creates the environment for a controlled population. The ‘free exchange’ of information that we notionally have access to on-line for example has been used as a tool to impose conformity among those who profess to seek independence of thought. In fact, the on-line community is high school writ on a grotesque scale. Coercion of views is so powerful that it’s as if you were escaping from the Scientologists if you dared to have opposing views from accepted norms.
Now we have official corporate nannies guiding your views, as your mother may have done during your childhood. As the linked article notes, we are warned off by the Facebook nannies if we even consider consuming views not of the accepted narrative. In fact such views are labelled as extremist. YouTube has also implemented such guidance as well as other popular platforms such as Instagram who warn you of “unverified” sources. This is the present day version of “eat your broccoli” by the mom surrogates of the online world. We are coerced to stay away from people who dare to even talk about things not approved for civilized people; the adult version of don’t hang out with the boy down the street with long hair who spends his days playing music.
As people move from adolescence, the constraints of behavior and thought imposed by their parents dissipate as they move on to their own sense of self. It’s called growing up. We are now in a novel phase of civilization wherein people refuse to grow up and instead live in a world of protracted adolescence. A society that promulgates pre adolescent conformity will result in one in which only a handful of savvy adults will control them.